Friends

April282015

Yesterday, I posted an interview with the executive director of Women, Action & the Media, a nonprofit organization dedicated to "building a robust, effective, inclusive movement for gender justice in media."

The editors found it inappropriate for the section of Forbes I have contributed my Social Ventures column to for the last three years - and they removed it this morning. I strongly disagree with their decision and we have parted ways.

Despite this, I appreciate the audience and platform Forbes provided, and am grateful for the opportunity to write about social entrepreneurship, citizens movements, new nonprofit models, and philanthropy. That conversation will continue elsewhere.

[I have posted tomwatson/sexism-and-the-media-as-election-heats-up-are-we-nearer-to-tipping-point-for-equality-a7d94d9a1280">my interview with Jamia Wilson at Medium and I consider her work, and that of feminist organizers everywhere, to be vitally important to the field of social entrepreneurship and to public life].

I make no secret about my personal investment in the process. It has been a life mission of mine to help elect a woman president and one day I hope to tell my young daughter that I did my small part in achieving that goal.

I was a senior staffer at Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign and an advisor before that. I have done a decade of consulting for the Clinton Global Initiative and Clinton Foundation. In all my encounters, I have been treated with the utmost integrity and respect by the Clinton family, staff and advisors. These are good people, dedicated to changing the world for the better. They are tireless and focused, disciplined, intelligent. The best that America has to offer.

There’s something more. During this campaign, we will witness the dawn of the Hillary Man. There is much talk about the important role women will play in the 2016 race. Just as crucial is the contribution of men who reject the rampant sexism and misogyny plaguing our world, the pervasive oppression of women and girls that stains every corner of this planet.

I have written extensively about this greatest of human travesties:

One out of every three women will be a victim of violence in her lifetime.

Women and girls ages 15 to 44 are more likely to be maimed or killed by men than by malaria, cancer, war or traffic accidents combined.

In some parts of the world a girl is more likely to be raped than to learn how to read.

Murder is a leading cause of death for pregnant women.

The children most at risk of attempted abduction by strangers are girls ages 10 to 14.

Every year, 60 million girls are sexually assaulted at or on their way to school.

Every 2 minutes, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted.

97% of rapists will never spend a day in jail.

Femicide is the leading cause of on-the-job death for women.

Only about one third of countries around the world have laws in place to combat violence against women, and in most of these countries those laws are not enforced.

In addition to sex-selective abortions, millions of girls and women are killed after birth through starvation and violence, forced abortions, ‘honor’ killings, dowry murders, and witch lynchings.

One thing is for certain in the 2016 campaign: the ultimate glass ceiling will not give way without a Herculean effort. As Tom and I both understand, sexism will rear its ugly head in myriad, unexpected ways. But if anyone can mount a successful assault on that glass ceiling, it’s Hillary Clinton.

Standing with her at every step will be the Hillary Men across America, who will help smash that ceiling, understanding both the symbolism and practicality of a women’s rights champion like Hillary Clinton in the White House.

TOM:

We are at the start of the most important feminist election cycle in American history. It’s not just that the most qualified female candidate is likely to win the nomination of her party for President for first time ever. It’s not just that the score in national U.S. politics remains a complete shut out, at 44-0. It’s not just that Hillary Clinton is the most admired woman in the United States and a liberal Democrat with more than three decades of public service behind her.

It’s that this time around – next year in fact – an explicit gender lens will applied to a national election for the first time in the nation’s history.

As men with public voices who have observed, commented on, and been allies of the growing and powerful network of organizers, social activists, and policy-makers that comprises the modern push for civil and economic equality for women, Peter and I are committed to seeing that gender lens applied appropriately.

We are committed to having that discussion about women and politics, about the great global civil rights struggle of our times, and about the nature of power that has excluded or limited half the population for far too long.

And yes, we have a candidate. We are both Democrats, both believers in progressive public policy and the power of government to help people – and we are both committed to the work of the social sector and the belief that a helping hand is part of what builds both small communities and great nations.

We are Hillary Men.

And yes, very specifically we are *men* for Hillary Clinton. We are consciously appealing to our brothers in public life and public speech, in party politics and corporate leadership, and on the broad social commons to apply their own gender lens to the 2016 election – and to commit to supporting an eminently qualified women to be our next President.

Just as there were Roosevelt Men and Kennedy Men, we believe there will be Hillary Men – men who answer history’s call to change the score, and help elect a woman to the highest office.

We understand that sexual bias in public life – and in the media – remains a barrier to the Presidency. We know that while Hillary Clinton has distinct advantages, she also faces a higher bar.

Our commitment in 2016 is not about the realization that sodden gender bias is as accepted in American politics as being left-handed. It is about the future and chance before us now – in our case, as politically active men. And while we intend to call out overt sexism and more subtle gender bias when we see it, our main goal is to make the ongoing case for electing the first woman President – and to argue that electing her is a vital and legitimate political and cultural goal for American men.

Rarely in U.S. political history has a prospective candidate come to the starting gate in a Presidential campaign with as much experience, knowledge, and insight into the workings of government as Hillary Clinton does ahead of the 2016 campaign. As a liberal who has long fought for the rights of the disenfranchised, and who has battled to extend the American social contract, Hillary Clinton can and should lay claim to the mantle of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson – as well as to the political legacy of the two great Democrats she’s worked most closely with: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

To be clear, neither of us believes in perfect alignment in political life. We disagree all the time on issues. We sometimes disagree with President Obama, we disagreed with President Clinton, and we disagree on occasion with Hillary Clinton. Our personal views on policy, both foreign and domestic, place us firmly in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Yet we both that Hillary Clinton is a strong liberal who is committed through a lifetime of service to the ideals that form the foundation of our own liberalism. In short, we march under the same banner.

This is a singular moment in American political history – but it also arrives at a crucial time for the world. As I’ve tomwatson/hillary-clintons-greatest-credential-af4513497d51">written before, over the last quarter century, Hillary Clinton has succeeded in placing the interests of women and girls atop the global development agenda. She didn’t do it alone — her partners included a network of brave human rights leaders around the world, as well as global and regional NGOs and the United Nations. But two aspects of this journey cannot be denied, even by those who dislike Clinton for political or personal reasons: she used every facet of every office and position she had to pursue this effort — from First Lady to U.S. Senator to the State Department—and her name is synonymous in the global movement for equal rights for women and girls with that ongoing fight for justice.

This matters. Indeed, it helps to define and legitimize the explicit gender lens we are suggesting men of goodwill place on the 2016 Presidential campaign. Political enemies like to ask derisively: “what has Hillary Clinton ever accomplished?” This is the answer – and it’s also the challenge: can we support the most accomplished woman in U.S. politics in achieving the nation’s highest office – a role she is obviously qualified for – with the intent of changing the national scorecard?

And can we (again, as men) do this for our daughters, our mothers, our sisters, our spouses, our colleagues, our families, our friends? I think we can, and I think we must.

Politics is not blind to race, to class, or to gender. Every fiber of American electoral history tells us that. In 2008, many of us wept openly at the sight of an African-American man speaking on Election Night – not just because we admired him (though we did) but because his victory was (and is) part of a long, imperfect, often frustrating but deeply important struggle for justice in this country.

This is another moment that reaches into that human part of us that demands justice, and calls us to action. It is a time to make history once again – and what a privilege that is.

So yes, we are Hillary Men. We are applying an explicit gender lens to this election. We are speaking out and we will continue to do so.

November072014

The Carlyle is one of those New York hotels. Scene of blue-blooded charity dinners through the ages and red-blooded Kennedy trysts (according to legend anyway, but what else do we have really?) the hotel is an elegant and cozy pre-Depression pile on the Upper East Side where the shrimp cocktail costs as much as the monthly rail pass from Babylon and the receiving rooms look like sets out of old Bowery Boys flicks - the kind of fancy joint Slip Mahoney and his pals were always getting tossed out of in some madcap pursuit of a society dame.

It's all central casting in gilt and polished wood. Just off the lobby along 76th Street, there are little lamps on the tables of Cafe Carlyle, a club where FDR is still the President, and the swells in publishing and banking and advertising leave their drivers to circle between Fifth and Madison while they carefully remove hand-crafted cigarettes from hand-crafted silver cases. Yes darling, Myrna Loy just brushed by you on her way to the powder room. William Powell waits impatiently.

The Carlyle is an island, a stitch in New York time. When Buster Poindexter lit up the room on a recent Thursday night during a rave-reviewed week-long residency with his swinging (but as yet unnamed) band, I thought for a moment of all the rooms long closed that David Johansen has inhabited in four decades of New York troubador residency. The Mercer Arts Center, Max's Kansas City, Tramps, CBGB, the Ritz, Peppermint Lounge, the Palladium, Danceteria, Cat Club, the Bottom Line, even poor old Ferris Booth Hall up on Morningside Heights, where Johansen's swinging Buster persona owned New York very early in its first run. All gone. But the Carlyle, where you half expect Bing Crosby to slide into the corner booth for the late show, soldiers on in a kind of holy timelessness that lights candles at that New York shrine of the night on the town.

And so does David Johansen, the original bridge and tunnel kid from Staten Island, and a naturally generous performer. During the short-lived but long-eulogized punk era in this town, the accepted pose was swagger and sneer, at least when the lights came on. But Johansen's poses were fun and approachable; he never played the starlet manque despite obvious fanzine comparisons to Mick Jagger (next to Johnny Thunders' waifish Keef from Queens). Johansen played it for fun, for the big night out, for the movement of the music. The glam was great, but the audience was always in on the gag. After a pumping version of Build Me Up Buttercup at the Ritz in 1981 (I think Blondie Chaplin was in that band but I may be wrong), he climbed onto one of the stage front monitors and cracked the big Cheshire grin that turns his eyes into slits of delight. "Mah people!" he crowed. "Mah people!"

The American songbook has always been a big deal to Johansen, from the Dolls days of Bo Diddley and Sonny Boy Williamson covers, to all the Motown tunes blasted out by the David Johansen Band, to the under-appreciated (but in my view, terrific) Harry Smiths material, which plumbed early blues and folk music. Buster moved him into standards, novelty numbers, Latin songs, country, and caberet. At the Carlyle, New York's My Home sent dishes clattering and waiters ducking for cover (Ray Charles and Sammy Davis Jr. would have dug it) and the 1905 music hall number, Nobody was perfect a blend of wry humor and pre-jazz pathos. "Last night I broke the seal on a Jim Beam decanter, shaped like Elvis," he crooned at the start of the George Jones classic, The King Is Gone. And that started another story that linked Nashville to Vaudeville to Tin Pan Alley to Chicago, via the Bowery and Mercer Street and St. George.

The Artist and I have taken in four shows during the new Buster 2.0 incarnation, and at the end of the latest night on the town we spent a few minutes with Johansen and his wife Mara Hennessey (who is a shining social media presence) in the Carlyle lounge, talking a little local politics and dropping names. Bridge and tunnel kids meeting the original, and chirping happily. Johansen has a reputation in New York cultural circles as a mensch, and he and Henessey are increasingly involved in progressive causes. "We need more good Democrats," he said.

We were there two of the well-known Tween brothers - Doug (and his wife Suzanne) and Brian (and his wife Michelle) - a couple of fellow '70s wastrels suited up for the proper Carlyle code. In two of the other shows in this Buster run, there have been former bandmates and bridge and tunnel kids in attendance: lawyers, firefighters, tech whizzes and financial honchos now but still tied by some thread of DNA to those old dance halls and clubs.

The thing about the Buster Poindexter act now is that Johansen doesn't just take you back to the day, he's teleporting everyone back across a full century - with a few jokes tossed in like croutons - and covering songs that tell stories of absurdity, madness, and showbiz strivers. On one level, it's all played for fun, with an approachable goofiness that breaks down the barrier between performer and audience. But I also think the songs are carefully chosen, and that the set has an existential punchline that you don't get till the ride home on the train: it's a hard world to get a break in, there's a bunch of lunatics out there, so let's sing a few songs.

In that way, David Johansen may be the quintessential New York performer of his generation. Why? Because it's an absurd town and always has been. The snap of the fingers, the rasp of the harmonica, the tap of the foot and the band swings into it. It's music that connects my immigrant family past with my punk adolescence and through to our present cultural malaise - music for this city glass curtain walls and the bigger black and white town of newsreels and archival photographs. And it's the music of a survivor as well - which, unless you're loaded, you have to be in New York to stick around.

Note: The Bridge and Tunnel Kid series has been on hiatus but yeah, it's back. [Thanks to Suzanne and some Broken Bow inspiration.] We may explore some other bits of personal New York history soon. In the meantime, the full series can be found here. Buster Poindexter has a terrific Facebook page, which can be found here.

March102014

Celebrity is a strange bolt of cloth. It wraps a mortal being and fashions something more than that, an image or an icon for a idolatrous crowd. When I was young and first walking the avenues in this town, celebrity held some currency as I think it does for most young people in the big city. Yet I find in my second half century that the fame of others, and their crowds, is worth very little and that I see only men and women and not boldface names and famous faces.

Yet in small but real way fame is driving this little project. In part, in the limited honesty of recollection this is a chance to gather a few instances of brushing against those names and faces, as any one who has practiced journalism in New York for thirty years or more surely must. It is a chance to name drop, to align my travels with those of others with more accomplishment, money or luck. And the flinging back of the curtain - what the venture capital crowd called "going open kimono" in the upscale conference rooms of the dot-com 90s - must reveal at least some truth about New York as well. Why? Because the millions inhabit streets where the thousands come to make their names. We are the giant sifting blade of celebrity and fortune. We are the mecca of fame, and those seeking it turn our way from the infinite points of the compass.

In 1992 in the dank, sweaty hockey arena built on the ruins of glorious old Pennsylvania Station, I stumbled in a crush of credentialed media and well lubricated Georgia delegates toward a belle figure of soul out of Memphis by way of Detroit. Aretha Franklin came down to the floor of the Democratic National Convention after singing the national anthem to a political assembly that would nominate Bill Clinton the next night. The flow of reporters, and delegates, and security guys with assorted ear pieces pushed me toward the great personage. And there on floor below the podium, I gasped a simple line of praise for her performance, which had translated Napoleonic Era martial music into sweet gospel. "Thank you, honey," she said, with a big smile. And then I was swept past.

And that was the moment when I felt most like any other fan gone weak at the knees. I've never smirked at the crowds lined up outside the Today Show since, or the kids who wait by the player's entrance at the ballpark to beg an autograph, or the middle managers who bid a few thousand at a charity auction to play golf with some politician or athlete. Everybody in this town has his moment of weakness under celebrity's gaze, with the rockets' red glare, and Aretha on the floor of the Garden was mine.

In 1960, Aretha was a bridge and tunnel kid herself (I count airline terminals too - it's my metaphor), courted and signed out of her father's touring church choir by John Hammond of CBS Records. She recorded her first mainstream album in a converted townhouse on Est 52nd Street built by the Vanderbilt family, originally as a stables and later as a guesthouse. It later became the first graduate school of the Juilliard School, before being converted to studios by CBS during the height of the pre-war record-making boom. The liner notes for Aretha: With The Ray Bryant Combo tell the truth as few liner notes ever have: "She doesn't just open the door - she breaks it down."

In truth, many break it down and this is the place come to do it. What they don't realize about fame is its sandy quality - and not the wet sand down by the surf either, the dry sand up on the dunes that runs through your fingers when you squeeze a handful. I can sit in the sun of these middle years and honestly say "son, I've seem 'em come and I've seen 'em go" but it's an old story, and somewhat shopworn. I don't value fame. Walking these streets alone, I often pass packs of paparazzi photographers waiting on a name I'll only dimly recognize in front of Manhattan hot spots that didn't exist a decade ago. They're waiting on a couple of Escalades and a posse of hangers on, the security guys and the flacks, for the brief "availability" that the famous person bestows a moment of photogenic glory and perhaps an autograph or two before being swept into a higher tier of worship. I don't wait to catch a glimpse. I do not care. I walk on. I whistle an old song.

Then too, there are the professional responsibilities that require the currency of fame to make them work; these are the precision Swiss clocks of charitable endorsements and policy appearances at conferences in support of worthy causes. I've had a lifetime's fill to go with a thousand pounds of warmed over catering hall chicken, though I will admit there are exceptions to the rule. Some meetings have been interesting. The Al Smith dinner at the Waldorf comprises an annual gathering of New York's Catholic clans, people who used to be reliable Democratic voters when social justice mattered to the faithful in the last century but who now generally lean Republican, weighed down perhaps by the jewelry on obvious display and too many generations of financial remove from the hard benches of Ellis Island. One year, as I've mentioned in a previous installment, I actually waited on the receiving line to meet Barack Obama. Two years earlier, I was hanging around a post-game party in a suite upstairs packed with politicians and those who want to meet them. Game 7 of the National League Championship Series was on the television by the bar (they'd famously lose with Carlos Beltran frozen at the plate by an Adam Wainright curveball) and I was watching the game with my brother Chris. Tim Russert, Andrew Cuomo and Chuck Schumer were working the room. I was heading back from the bar toward the Mets game when I was caught in a political scrum by the windows overlooking Park Avenue. And suddenly, there was Hillary Clinton at my elbow - and despite the callouses of fame met, fame interviewed, and fame easily dismissed I felt the shiver up my leg that Chris Matthews got two years later for her Democratic opponent. Hillary was a month away from squashing former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer, a Republican who I knew from his major waterfront revamp for The New York Times, in her reelection campaign.At the time, Clinton was a very popular Senator, a political fact that has been eclipsed by her 2008 match with Obama and subsequent success as his Secretary of State. In the Waldorf suite, we chatted briefly about the race, and about the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, a month earlier. That conversation stayed with me for years because my experience ran exactly counter to the celebrity Hillary Clinton I knew only through the media. The public figure I encountered was warm and charming, with a quick laugh, and she paid close attention to the conversation. She was a good listener.

Ed Koch was not. Yet he didn't live up to his public billing either. Sure, on television he was abrasive, confrontational, nasally bellicose. And in the politics I observed in the late 70s and early 80s and covered in the last half of the decade, Koch was aggressive and towering. In the film NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell, Koch famously declared - several times - of political adversaries in that landmark mayoral race: "my attitude was...fuck 'em!" Koch played for keeps, and he didn't hesitate to run the other guy down. In the late 80s, his administration proposed 1,000 units of middle income housing next to John F. Kennedy High School in Kingsbridge, a massive development that would have overwhelmed an already crowded urban landscape. I was the deputy editor and political reporter for The Riverdale Press, which covered Kingsbridge and Marble Hill in addition to more sylvan districts up the hill in northwest Bronx. The Mayor had already declared his intentions to crush local opposition thusly: "You know how it is in Riverdale, don't you? It's last one in shut the door!"

Amidst that level of discourse, Koch invited the Press editorial board to lunch at City Hall. The delegation consisted of co-publishers Buddy and Richard Stein, and me. The paper, in those days, was probably the finest local independent newspaper in New York City, and among the very finest in New York State. We were strongly liberal, strongly preservationist, and strongly dedicated to free speech; the editorial page was a must-read for citywide politicians and Bronx wannabes, and it boasted an incredible range of opinion. In those days before the Bloomberg bullpen, the Mayor ran a small dining room beneath his office, complete with a kitchen and staff. The diners included deputy mayor Stan Brezenoff and Dan Wolf, founding editor of the Village Voice and major domo of Koch's kitchen cabinet. The lunch was very civilized - though I recall Koch defending subway shooter Bernie Goetz, strangely enough - and the Press continued to oppose Tibbett Gardens, the giant housing project. But something else stuck with me: Ed Koch's manners and civility. When the gathering was being seated, I was uncertain where to drop myself as the most junior diner at the table, momentarily flummoxed by the deference due both my bosses and the city fathers. "Tom," said Koch, "you sit here by me."

A couple of years later, when the Press was firebombed by terrorists with links to Iran (or so the FBI told us), Koch spoke at a public rally for the paper, in the last year of his Mayoralty and a third term that was - to put it kindly - a disaster. Yet he rose to the occasion: “Mr. Mayor,” a reporter asked, “hasn’t this newspaper been very rough on you on their editorial page?”

“Sure they have,” Mr. Koch replied, “but I don’t respond by throwing bombs, I write letters to the editor!”

Koch's successor, David Dinkins, was an all around nice guy who you'd want to be seated next to at any New York function you might find yourself attending. When he was running against Rudolph Giuliani to succeed Koch, he bumped into fellow Press reporter Larry Dublin at a Riverdale fundraiser. Larry, a great friend who was filling in on the political coverage in a busy season but really hounded the public schools beat, told Dinkins that I'd interviewed him a few weeks earlier and would be following up for a series of formal sit-downs with the major candidates. Dinkins didn't miss a beat at the mention of my name: "Great guy!" he effused, though in truth the connection must have been tiny in his recollection. It's a big city.

You'll notice the hypocrisy of names baldly dropped in a chapter that claims little affinity for fame. In part, that's the nature of New York and its centrality to the machine that creates famous people, nourishes them, and either spits them or protects them from decades. I am not immune to the famous face or the great accomplishment, and there is a small shiver to be obtained - still - from proximity to a great artist or world leader. Yet, they are all to be glimpsed as easily as street trees and mount cops in this town and everyone has his own A list, ignoring (for the most part) everyone else. The other factor is the sheer glut of celebrity provided by New York. There is an over abundance in the market that depresses the value of fame, and unlike the manufacturing sector that vanished in the last generation, the fame factories are still working double shifts, enriched by the digital age of sharing and linking, and drugged up by the vile lattes and bitter, burned brew that passes for actual joe from the invasive "green" northwestern franchise that has stamped out the once vital New York coffee shops. Vanity Fair can hardly keep up. TMZ is everywhere. Instagram runs the DIY shift on the late nights, and Twitter is young flack's dream.

And it is all so fleeting. When I was a young political reporter, the celebrity and power of Ed Koch held some value. But I also remember the names of the day who were regularly in headlines, but won't be all that deeply remembered. Andrew Stein. Liz Holtzman. Stanley Steingut. Ruth Messinger. Names from the Green Book. Big deals at the time, all

Sometimes the shooting star halts in mid-flight. I was taken with a chapter in Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades, and Hurrahs last year's collection of essays by my friend James Wolcott. The story recalled the turbo-prop career of television host Stanley Siegel, who fronted a show called A.M. New York in the late 70s. Writing for the Voice 35 years ago, Wolcott predicted: "He's going to be a megastar on TV, not only because of his ebullience, impudent charm, and spacey wit, but because the way he waves and unfurls his personality like a toreador's cape is perfect for the therapy-junkie seventies."

I remember Siegel from that era, a super-caffeinated nerve ending on the morning show of high school sick days. But it didn't happen. "His comet went cold," recalled Wolcott, and Siegel "seemed to dematerialize into the Phantom Zone."

Which is, of course, what happened to me. Oh certainly, I yearned for a larger audience, for followers, for recognition, for standing. I found some alleyways of brief renown, some circulation, a few arguments, the bylines along the way, and some smaller moments with a lav mic hooked to my jacket. Yet we're all mostly Stanley Siegels among the bridge and tunnel crowd, slinging guitars and laptops through the years, blathering on about the outrage of the moment, putting our talent and social currency at risk. But most of us find the Phantom Zone.

It's the nature of the city, the game. Fame is too common, celebrity too present. In the late 90s I was scheduled for a meeting at Sony, and Jason Chervokas and I killed some time in the lobby up on 57th Street, fooling around with the new game systems they were developing and showing off for the public. I was playing a stock car themed racing game, and quickly crashed the virtual vehicle.

"OK, son," said a voice at my elbow, in the booming drawl of a southern sheriff. "Step away from the vehicle and keep your hands where I can see 'em!"

I walked away from the video game, and Jason filled me in. Do you realize who that was? No, says I. Robin Williams, he said. And sure enough, there he was - and improvising humor exactly as you'd expect. That's New York. I walked though a location set of Hannah and Her Sisters and was a block away before I realized the guy on the milk crate was Woody Allen. I laughed at Jimmy Breslin as he filmed a commercial for Piels on Broadway, mocking the "good drinkin' beer" tagline. I watched Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd film Ghostbusters on 116th Street. Mayors, Governors, Presidents, CEOs. They all came here looking for work, as Maggi Waters used to say in the Riverdale Press newsroom.

Fame's currency vanished for me as a journalist; I won't follow anyone around anymore. New York levels us, the famous and the rich. The boldface names get sick, drink too much, feel lonely at times, and put on their pants a leg at a time. New York, wrote E.B. White, "makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin - the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled." That commonality knocks down fame, in a way. You can be well-known for a while in this town, but you still can't hail a cab at 4 pm when it's raining.

January122014

The phrase "during the war" played an out-sized role in my suburban New York upbringing, and it meant only one conflict - not the Vietnam War, which raged for my entire childhood, producing casualty counts nightly on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, waning only in adolescence; not the Korean War, which produced several veterans who became parents of my school mates; not even the Great War, during which my grandfather flew planes that were little more than canvas kites with machine guns strapped to them.

No, "the war" invariably meant the big one itself, the Second World War, which transformed society at almost every level, made the United States into a superpower, and scattered American culture to the far ends of the Earth, where it took root, for good and bad. World War II was New York's war, of course - directed by a New Yorker who traced his roots to Dutch immigrant Claes van Rosenvelt, whose farm covered the portion of midtown Manhattan now occupied by the Empire State Building, Madison Square Garden, and Macy's. It was the center of shipping, the terminus for railroads and troop trains. the Brooklyn Navy Yard employed 10,000 men and plenty of women too, and it produced both the USS Missouri upon which the Empire of Japan surrendered to Douglas MacArthur, former commandant of West Point who served at St. Mihiel with my grandfather in the previous war, and wood-planked PT 109, which turned a gangly Massachusetts lieutenant, whose family lived in Riverdale and Bronxville while the patriarch raked in millions in the city, into a national hero and future President.

Pre-war and post-war in New York are generally real estate descriptors, or at least they were before the latest building boom or two. The war changed the landscape. It made New York a world capital, center of post-war American commerce, headquarters to the United Nations, financial capital of the global conflict's sole undamaged victor. Public housing exploded, and slum clearance accelerated. Robert Moses really became the Power Broker under unofficial war powers - the Throgs Neck and the Whitestone bridges went up with war looming; with victory won, Moses had virtually cart blanche to build highways through the 1960s.

My own arrival in the post-war world was 17 years after Hitler's suicide and the dual atomic bombs, incubated as they were at 270 Broadway, with technical facilities at Columbia, tested in the western deserts, and immortalized as the Manhattan Project. In our suburban precincts, the war in the 60s meant either Europe or the South Pacific. My grandfather, a fighter pilot in the Great War in France, trained new fliers in the rural south, ruining what remained of his tenuous health. Four uncles wore the uniform in World War Two. His oldest son Thomas Quinlan, my Godather, served a Stateside Army stint. Gus Ryan was a tanker in Western Europe, and I remember the old dud shells used as door-stoppers and the German field glasses on the porch at Lake Mahopac. Lou Dermako out of the coal fields on Pennsylvania was a front line Marine officer fighting island to island in the Pacific, and George Quinlan a Navy petty officer driving LSTs to the those same bloody beaches. They met on a homebound troop ship after the war, future brothers in law. None of them talked about the details of the war very much.

In the 1980s, I interviewed a survivor of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He lived with his wife on Tibbett Avenue in Kingsbridge, just north of West 231 Street in the Bronx. It was a neat little apartment and family photographs covered one of the tables in the living room where we sat for an hour of so. He'd been assigned to the Army Air Corps base at Wheeler Airfield near Honolulu, and when the Japanese attacked, he helped to get a small contingent of fighter planes into the air despite the devastation on the ground. At Wheeler on December 7th, 33 were killed and more than 70 wounded and much of the air wing destroyed on the ground. He returned to work for the Transit Authority in maintenance for forty years. He told me the interview was the first time he'd talked about Pearl Harbor in any detail, not even to his children. I asked him why he's risked his life to run across the tarmac to get the few remaining planes into the air and his answer has stayed with me since that afternoon in Kingsbridge. "They were killing my friends. What else could I do? They were killing my friends."

During that same period in Riverdale, writing stories for The Press, I got to know Stuart Elenko, a history teacher at the Bronx High School of Science and founder of the Holocaust Studies Center there. Stuart had assembled an important collection of artifacts from the European cauldron, including uniforms, propaganda, posters, Nazi insignia, and Jewish stars. He taught a generation of students to remember the brutality of the past and its grave lessons of man's inhumanity to man. I joined the Board of Directors of the Center and did what I could to promote its mission. During the time, I met quite a few residents of the apartment towers and garden homes of Riverdale and Kingsbridge who still carried tattooed numbers on their arms. One day, I asked Stuart (who was a child during the war) why he spent so much of his life creating the collection, building the center, and working with young people to understand the horrors of Nazi Europe, and Stuart's answer was so similar to the Pearl Harbor survivor's - "they killed my people."

Yet there was also a sense of glamor about "the war" in the New York I grew up in. Part of that related to popular culture and recent memories - Sinatra and the bobby soxers, the Stage Door Canteen, war bond rallies, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, Irving Berlin’s This Is the Army, and VE and VJ Day celebrations in Times Square. And part of that living memory in New York was related to World War Two's permanent status as "the good war" in a era of decidedly bad U.S. military policy. As "the war" receded in actuality, replaced by gauzy memories in black and white, it competed with New York's Vietnam era protests, book-ended by the take over of Columbia's campus by militant students and the infamous Hard Hat Riot of 1970 in lower Manhattan, in which two hundred construction workers armed with pipes and wrenches and other tools of their trade set upon a thousand or so high school and college kids protesting the war, callow bridge and tunnel kids mainly, carring signs and chanting against Nixon. Later, of course, I covered all manner of anti-war protests as a journalist - most were pretty tame and you came to know the familiar lefty faces - and finally marched on my own against the Bush Administration's disastrous and brutal adventurism in Iraq.

Despite its popular caricature as a hotbed of liberalism, New York is not anti-military. Quite the contrary. New York loves the American armed forces, celebrates the service of men and women in uniform, and - speaking in the kind generality that get sociologists in trouble - I think it's far to say that in part, New Yorkers love the U.S. military because of its reputation as a meritocracy, a leg up for those newly arrived or living below the poverty line. This quality was not always there, of course, and I remember well interviewing Roscoe Brown as a reporter for The Riverdale Press. Dr. Brown was then the president of Bronx Community College and one the borough's most respected public figures, but as a 21-year-old college kid he became a pilot in the 100th Fighter Squadron of the 332nd Fighter Group, also known as the Tuskegee Airmen. He told the story of becoming the first American pilot to shoot down one of Germany's advanced jet fighters, in a battle for the skies over the Ploesti oil fields. Years later as a consultant, I worked with my friend Karen Davis on a campaign to raise funds and awareness to preserve Moton Field in Tuskegee, Alabama as a national monument.

There are World War Two monuments all around New York, but they seem muted compared to the statues from the 1820s and the Civil War and up through the Great War. One of the most moving is the memorial to the Merchant Marine service, in Battery Park looking out toward the harbor and the Statue of Liberty. On spring days when I worked on down Broad Street, I'd sometimes wander over to eat lunch in the sun by the water, near the bronze figures created by sculptor Marisol Escobar on the rebuilt stone breakwater. To my eye, they seemed to be looking out to see for brothers who would never return from the waves.

In most office pre-war buildings in midtown, there's a simple bronze plaque dedicated to those who died in the conflict. A few years ago when I was working in the old Daily News Building - also known as the Daily Planet in the first Superman movie; that's Christopher Reeve's Clark Kent coming through the revolving doors on East 42nd Street - and I stopped to look at the memorial on the wall next to the newsstand. The lobby is famous for the huge, slowly turning globe set in the floor with lines on the floor running to imaginary points around the world. There's also an anemograph that displays wind speed and direction from instruments on the roof. When the tabloid's founder, the ultra-conservative Colonel Joseph Medill Patterson, heard about plans for the weather station, he famously scoffed at the designers: "Weather charts! What the people want are murder charts - some kind of map of the metropolitan area where the latest crimes could be chalked up." I enjoyed walking through that lobby almost every day I worked in the building, and the plaque itself was contrast to the ambitions of a newsaper's bold public space (a newspaper, I might add, that had long since moved to the far West Side and a drab box near the highway). There were the names of typesetters, and copy editors, and ad salesmen, and compositors like my father. I imagined the returning Daily News veterans stopping to look at that simple memorial and remember as they picked up cigarettes at the newsstand. And I thought that it was these returning veterans who really built the post-war New York that was so familiar to me.

They were all men of course, but their impact on the landscape - physical, intellectual, political - can't be understated. Anthony Dominick Benedetto, later known as a Tony Bennett, whose Central Park painting studio aerie Steve Manzi and I visited one morning during a campaign to create a new public high school for the performing arts in Queens, was a member of the 63rd Infantry Division in France and Germany. Hugh Carey, 51st Governor of New York and the man who saved New York City during its fiscal crisis in the 1970s, an enlisted man who rose to rank of Colonel in Europe, who I got to know late in life through his generous and whipsmart daughter Susan Carey Dempsey, long my colleague and co-conspirator. Lew Rudin, head of one of New York's famed real estate families, who I met several times through his son Bill (our landlord at 55 Broad Street), a real builder of the city who led a coalition to partner with Gov. Carey and avoid the city's financial ruin, was a returning U.S. Army sergeant. David Dinkins, the most gentlemanly of the Mayors of New York City that I've known and interviewed, a returning U.S. Marine who refused to let racial quotes block his way into war-time service.

These were men who didn't focus on "the war" very much. Like my uncles, they quickly moved to build new lives. But that service, that war, was still just there, right along the pavement, one of the largest communal enterprises in the nation's history, and focusing event for a huge city emerging from the Great Depression. It threatened death and destruction, and killed tens of millions; but in the American story it also offered opportunity and enforced discipline and a sense of common purpose in a generation of young men and women. That created the New York landscape I grew up in, a landscape that began to crumble in the 1970s to be sure, but one that retained a permanent outline sketched by the war years.

One aspect of those times that David Weiner's Mad Men captures so well (despite its other faults) is that restlessness of those veterans to build and to move and to create something different. When Roger Sterling talks about "the war" he could easily slide into a dinner conversation at my grandmother's house in Yonkers. Thirty years on, with another war raging, it was still a presence. Just like like the black and white photographs of men in uniform on some of the walls, the old Army Air Corps major's cap that hung on a corner of my grandmother's bed.

December152013

In his 1946 essay Why I Write, George Orwell fused a writer's development with his personal experiences, and in particular, the times he has lived in.

I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.

Orwell was only partly right, of course. Not only should a writer not seek to escape all early influences - it is impossible do so, shy of serious brain injury. The energy used in attemping to flee the past (and I speak of childhood, family, friends, and places) is wasted, and the writing is flat and little more than advertising copy. That kind of forced detachment simply denies too much; it denies biology and experience and living memory, and it denies faces and smells and visions and dreams. It flattens the landscape. It ruins the work.

No writer doggedly spending decades in New York committing millions of words to paper, Linotype machines, newsprint, and various hard drives and blogging platforms can hope to achieve anything while annuling the past. In New York, the past may be the remnants of meal consumed at dawn that has been spectacularly regurgitated upon the downtown subway platform at Union Square. Or it can be the spot just up on the street corner above the station, where the body of President Abraham Lincoln passed in review down Broadway, as young Theodore Roosevelt watched from a window in his grandfather's house just above the procession. In my wanderings in that same vicinity, the deli at 213 Park Avenue South offers more than a quick meal - it's the former Max's Kansas City, headquarters for stripped down rock and bands that never made it big, but certainly made it loud three decades ago. That pungent memory, which may still grip the staircase on the left side as you face the building, cannot be detached from the rows of Snapples and chips. After all, the great Cheetah Chrome once sat slumped on the curb right there.

Around the corner to the west on Broadway is the giant home goods emporium, ABC Carpet and Home, where my wife worked for many years in the antique furniture department and where the Santa Claus who patroled the first floor in those early years wore a regal and very real Yuletide beard. During her time on those wide old factory floorboards, she worked with a team of brilliant Polish carpenters, canny antiquties importers, and decoraters to the stars. And sometimes the stars themselves: DeNiro, Springsteen, and Streisand all darkened her door. Down the block on 18th Street is the Old Town Bar, where I passed an enjoyable evening just last week with journalists and labor organizers, taking a lively discussion organized by the Sidney Hillman Foundation to a tavern that opened in 1892, when Teddy Roosevelt was a civil service commissioner. The too-youthful ghosts of regulars Frank McCourt and Seamus Heaney lingered nearby: "between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests."

This is a neighborhood of regulars: well-worn native paths and favored spots at the bar or in the dining room. On 16th Street just in from Broadway is the Union Square Cafe, the mid-80s reinvention of New York cuisine by Danny Meyers. It remains an unfussy and crisply professional restaurant with the best ingredients served simply, and in the far corner table by the front window is the spot one those regulars, a place where I have met Andrew Rasiej for quite a few lunches. Andrew is a restless autodidact, an entrepreneur who is drawn to civic engagement and driven by his own curiosity. In classic New York terms, he is a good man to know because he knows everyone and remembers his friends. Not long after my father died, we sat in that corner table discussing our particular stage in life and the pain of losing a family member and he said something I've thought of often since, just simple advice quickly dispensed but also wise: "It never goes away, Tom, not really. Just carry it forward and keep it with you." And so I have.

Like me though in more prominent fashion, Andrew has had several discrete New York chapters - founding companies and nonprofits, running for public office, and serving as a public intellectual - and we've known each other since the mid-90s and the time when the city's technology sector grew from a few tiny scattered digital seeds. But in an earlier era, he ran Irving Plaza, the former Polish-American veterans hall across the park at Irving Place and 15th Street that became a rock venue in the late 1970s. In 1981, I was standing outside on the line to get in, when the evening's headline act walked down the block greeting the waiting kids. Jim Carroll was tall, thin, and had the lean and austere cheeks and penetrating eyes of an aschetic poet from central casting - which, in many ways, he was. The author of the The Basketball Diaries, his tale of playing ball and hustling in an earlier uptown Manhattan, Carroll had formed the Jim Carroll Band the year before at the suggestion of Patti Smith, and cut Catholic Boy, a truly classic album of verse set to a driving rock beat. Its big hit was People Who Died, the tale of picaresque New York characters who'd passed on, in mostly violent ways. So here came Carroll walking along the line of fans, a semi-reluctant rock star and a punk hero to all the Catholic books lined up in black jeans and sneakers. In the words of his editor Gerry Howard: "Tall, slim, athletic, pale, and spectral as many ex-junkies are, Jim was a vivid presence in any setting. He was a classic and now vanishing New York type: the smart (and smartass) Irish kid with style, street savvy, and whatever the Gaelic word for chutzpah is."

When Carroll died in 2009 from a sudden heart attack at age 60, still productive but worn down by the hard years, I wrote a remembrance that his editors kindly included on his website: "For a bridge and tunnel kid in 1980 New York...check that...for a Catholic bridge and tunnel kid in 1980 New York, Jim Carroll's Catholic Boy was canonical, a bass-charged liturgy of the word - if the word descended from the Beats and Allen Ginsberg, its bearer transfigured into a poetry-pouting punk rocker with an angry hit record. ... Jim Carroll Band shows always brought out the punk royalty, from Patti Smith to Stiv Bators to Richard Hell. At least in my (somewhat gauze-wrapped) memory, they were real events and Carroll - who couldn't really sing per se, but still knew how to sell the story - was treated like an archbishop. And based on that one record, it didn't seem too much to bend and kiss the ring." Thinking about these New York paths and those who have traveled them, I looked into Carroll's verses again recently and was struck by these lines from New York City Variations:

I have walked these streets so often I couldforge the shadows of skyscrapers as they fallto rest between the sculptured air of midtown.

I feel that way on these blocks, and there on Irving Place where I shook Jim Carroll's slim hand as a young Catholic boy ("Redeemed through pain/And not through joy") the shadows are long ones, even if the building heights are more modest than in midtown a few blocks north. Greatest among those is the Knickerbocker himself, Washington Irving, for whom the short avenue between 14th Street and Gramercy Park was named in the 1830s by developer Samuel Bulkley Ruggles (who drew up plans for the entire neighborhood, including Union Square, which he owned) while the famed author, perhaps New York's most revered personage, was still living. Ruggles is one of the great forgotten New Yorkers. He was born in 1800 in Connecticut, went to Yale, and made a successful law career in New York, working as a developer and part-time politician and serving in the State Assembly, as a trustee of Columbia, and on the Canal Commission governing the Erie Canal. He was a friend of Irving's, as well as philanthropic industrialist Peter Cooper, and it is Ruggles who is responsible for the keys that govern entrance to the still private Gramercy Park, but also the trees and paths of Union Square. He was the Robert Moses of an earlier century, blending public interest with his own Whig politics, proclaiming, "Come what will, our open squares will remain forever imperishable. Buildings, towers, palaces, may moulder and crumble beneath the touch of time; but space - free, glorious, open space - will remain to bless the City forever."

The Irving Place environs had a literary pedigree from the start. While Irving himself never lived there, his nephew did and he certainly trod its cobblestones. Up on Gramery Park, the Players Club was founded by a group of glitterati headed up Mark Twain and Edwin Booth, with a promise to promote "social intercourse between members of the dramatic profession and the kindred professions of literature, painting, architecture, sculpture and music, law and medicine, and the patrons of the arts." Later in the century, the prominent lesbian power couple of actress-author Elsie de Wolfe and theater agent Elisabeth Marbury - dubbed "The Bachelors" by catty scribes down on Park Row - hosted a literary salon on 17h Street that attracted regulars like George Bernard Shaw, Sarah Bernhardt, Ethel Barrymore and Oscar Wilde.

Next door, my good friend the journalist Pamela Parker hosted her own salon in a postage stamp apartment with a huge terrace festooned with whimsical gargoyles overlooking Irving Place in the early 2000s. At one gathering thick with bloggers and techno geeks, Jason Chervokas and I used the music sharing service Napster to dial in a virtual mix that was heavy on old school R&B, 70s soul, and sides by the Ramone and Beastie Boys, who used to hang out at Carmelita's Reception House, a former bridal reception house turned hipster bar, around the corner at Third Avenue and 14th Street just above the Disco Donut. I met Pamela when I was an adjunct professor at the Columbia J-School and she was a student, and she later worked for Chervokas and me as a skilled and prolific assistant editor for @ny, our Internet startup in the 90s. When she met a young Scottish lad named Michael Caird she thought was a keeper, I snarkily wagered that if they married, I'd wear a kilt to the wedding. Happily, I lost the bet and donned the tartan.

Just down the block after the turn of the 20th century, former banker William Sydney Porter of North Carolina built a new persona after a five-year stretch for embezzlement in Ohio. He wrote under the name O. Henry, lived at 55 Irving Place and (perhaps apocryphally) wrote his best-known short story The Gift of the Magi in a booth at Kenealy's bar, later known as Pete's Tavern, one of New York's oldest watering holes and the spot where my lifelong friend Doug Tween had his bachelor dinner in an upstairs room two decades ago and more. Porter was a drinking man (he drank himself to death) but he liked company and not darkened empty streets. “Pull up the shades so I can see New York," he wrote. "I don't want to go home in the dark.”

The oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, The Nation, a bastion of the American left, is published on Irving Place these days, across the street from Washington Irving High School. The redoudtable editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel looks down on Ruggles's old lane, carrying - if she will forgive me for observing - a name that would slide with ease and authenticity into the Knickerbocker tales of the street's literary namesake. In Irving's time, two bedrock institutions graced the southern terminus of the block. Tammany Hall opened in 1868 on East 14th Street, the home of New York's regular Democratic organization, a post Civil War successor to the old downtown Tammany and controller of city elections until Jimmy Walker was forced to resign the Mayoralty in 1932. Across the street was the Academy of Music, a grand opera hall that seated 4,000 people in its heyday and later scandalized the city's upper crust with the "French balls" held by the Cercle Française de l'Harmonie, which featured partially clad courtesans mingling rather closely with men in Victorian dinner dress. The opera house gave way to a large movie theater under the same name, and that Academy of Music was later renamed the Palladium, which became a prime venue for rock and roll, where I saw sold out shows by Elvis Costello, Warren Zevon, Squeeze, and others.

"Hey where’d you get that beat?" asked Sylvain Sylvain on his eponymous post New York Dolls record in 1979. "I got that beat on 14th Street." That Sylvain should pen the anthem to the street, which crosses Manhattan at its widest part - from Stuyvesant Cove on East River to the Hudson sixteen long blocks west - is somehow fitting. Born to Egyptian Jewish parents, Sylvain Mizrahi fled anti-Semitism and arrived in New York City via Buffalo in the 1950s. He formed the New York Dolls with David Johansen, Johnny Thunders, Billy Murcia and Arthur Kane in 1971 and when the Dolls went the way of all flesh and most rock bands in 1977, he became a solo act as well as the omnipresent raconteur of the city's homegrown rock scene. Sylvain's 14th Street Beat opened with the squealing sound of the subway train under Union Square, to this day perhaps the loudest stretch of underground track in New York, where a curve in the Lexington Avenue line forces a grinding of wheels and brakes that makes platform denizens hold their ears to stave off the pain.

Union Square itself is not named for either the labor movement or the American republic of states, though it has served as both a headquarters for labor rallies and blue-backed Union troops in its history. The name actually has more rural origins, from the days when urban New York lay well to its south and walls and fields and the occasional house and hostelry graced the neighborhood. It is merely the intersection - the union - of two main roads, the Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway) and Bowery Road (now Park Avenue South and Fourth Avenue). The public square part came from Sam Ruggles, who also foresaw the real estate benefits of building elegant houses around the parkland. The layout these days owes its landscape architectural bones to the work of Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1870s, when Union Square lay a block east of Ladies Mile and featured some of the city's most expensive homes on its edges.

In the late 1970s when I first ventured through its paths, drawn to the music scene at Max's and other venues, Union Square Park was something of an outdoor drug supermarket, in the evenings a place of occasional menace or opportunity (depending on your viewpoint or habit), very much like Washington Square Park to the south and Bryant Park to the north. The northeast corner was a biker hangout in summer, with rows of motorcycles lining the pavement. That block between Park Avenue South - the former Fourth Avenue, renamed by value-seeking real estate boosters after the Second World War - and Broadway to the west should carry some recognition for the artist who walked it often. Between The Factory in the Decker Building near Broadway and the back room at Max's on the east side Park Avenue, Andy Warhol trod between salons of his own creation and influence.

"Sometimes the little times you don't think are anything while they're happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life," wrote Warhol in 1975, and I believe that's true. A small episode in the Union Square Barnes & Noble, next door to the old Factory headquarters, has stayed with me this last decade or more. In 1999, I went to see the great author Patrick O'Brian read from his latest novel Blue at the Mizzen at the Union Square store. To me, O'Brian was no more a nautical writer than Jane Austen was a society writer. Like Austen, his literary hero, O'Brian worked in human relationships. That those relationshops are set amid a constrained, regimented social order - British warships in the age of sail - was his greatest homage to Austen, who also set her stories within a tight social order. At their heart, O'Brian's volumes in the 20-part Aubrey-Maturin series chronicle a deep friendship, one that is not the cartoonish type usually found in historical series, but a detailed, nuanced, portrait - to my mind, one of the finest in English literature.

O'Brian's rapidly-expanding popularity in the last decade of his life, and the posthumous depiction of his characters in a raucous Hollywood epic, may lead the unitiated to relegate his work to that of the pulp paperback writer or the creator of historical pageantry. It is not to insult those genres to say he was neither. Indeed, when I briefly met O'Brian before his last public appearance in New York, browsing quietly amidst the ground-floor shelves in Union Square before the reading, it felt to me like shaking hands with Charles Dickens. O'Brian had a strong sense of time and the nearness of history, of the paths and routes traveled only very recently but seen by contemporaries as very old. "The tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value," he wrote in one of his introductions, "and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to the Greeks for 2,000 years and more.”

And we are closer to the culturally formative Knickerbocker days of Irving than we feel, more proximate to the great political rallies of organized labor and radicals and Fenians in Union Square than we think, and nearer to the art scene of Warhol and the punks at Max's than we realize. And much, much nearer to the massive missing persons bulletins of September, 2001 that grew along Union Square's southern edge in the aftermath of horror when much of the city south of 14th Street was closed off for recovery of the dead. Union Square was the closest large public space still open, and the statue of George Washington - the first erected by New Yorker since the one depicting George III was toppled in 1777 - became a locus for missing persons flyers bearing the faces of New Yorkers who would never return home. Those posters quickly grew into a spontaneous memorial of flowers and candles and home-made art of the kind that now graces every public tragedy. I remember both the concentration of grief at that site, and the unity of those brief times, when "New Yorker" became a badge defiantly worn. Never has the communitarian impulse that binds millions to live so closely together been more evident to me.

Last year, I was walking to the subway station after teaching my class at New York University's graduate school of fundraising and philanthropy with Marcia Stepanek and Howard Greenstein, and saw the crowd across 14th Street. I walked across and worked my way through the crowd. In my reporting days, I carried a press pass issued by the NYPD allowing me to "cross police and fire lines wherever formed." But now I was merely an intinerant blogger, consultant, and part-time professor seeing what was going on - scoping the latest in the legacy of protest that constitutes so much of Union Square's political and cultural history. As I turned and shifted through the hundreds pressed in tightly by the park's south end, I recognized the woman holding a microphone, which was plugged into a portable loudspeaker. It was Trayvon Martin's mother. "My son did not deserve to die," said Sybrina Fulton. "Our son is your son."

I was transported along the pathways and karmic lanes to the mourners of a decade earler. Orwell was right; we are determined by the age we live in, and if we writing, that work is not detached but rooted in fields ploughed by others, along ways worn down by our younger footsteps. Nowhere is this more evident than in New York, where so many come to find their way, make their case, write their story, sing their song, find their justice.

"My heart is in pain," said Travyon Martin's mother into the microphone. And the crowd responded in solemn unison amid the ghosts of this city.

December072013

Columbia University has for years used 854-1754 as its main telephone number, and it is the line that shows up when student volunteers call alumni to seek donations during the dinner hour. It is, I suppose, a clever reminder that Columbia was founded in 1754, twenty-two years before American independence, as King's College in what was then still a relatively young British colony. It is the fifth oldest university in the United States, one of the original nine chartered colonial colleges and it has achieved a global aura of prestige and exclusivity that could never have been imagined by anyone who attended Columbia College in the 1970s and early 80s, when it had no endowment and some of its facilities were ramshackle wooden death traps (Baker Field, several miles north of the main campus in Inwood on the nothern tip of Manhattan, in particular).

Outside of the lecture hall that bears his name, there is a statue of Alexander Hamilton, the bastard son of a Scottish laird born in Nevis, West Indies and the first self-made immigrant to the United States, a King's College man and the first Treasury Secretary, a liberal Federalist who created the central government that has endured for two hundred years and constitutes the largest economic and political enterprise ever created by human beings.

On a rainy night in 1983, I raced past the statue and around the corner of Hamilton Hall toward College Walk and the gate on Amsterdam Avenue. An all-night Strat-o-matic baseball tournament raged around the table upstairs in Livingston, and I'd drawn the assignment of meeting the delivery man from Hunan Balcony. The campus was partly closed, heavily circled with police and campus security because of a series of large-scale protests organized by students to protest the University's continued investment in funds that did business with the racist Apartheid regime in South Africa. It wasn't exactly 1968, Vietnam and Mark Rudd, but the crowds had been sufficiently boisterous - and University officials talked vaguely of trouble-making "outsiders."

It was dark and chilly, and I jogged around Hamilton and ran directly into one of those feared outside agitators, who I immediately recognized. "Hey, hold up," said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was carrying a megaphone at the head of a dripping contingent of perhaps a hundred protesters. The weather had clearly held down attendance. There seemed to be more cops than activists. The crowd moved toward Amsterdam Avenue and I moved with it. The signs demanded that Columbia divest itself of all South African investments, in order to stem the flow of capital to the white ruled country and pressure the Apartheid regime to give up its racist hold on power.

Divestment began as a liberal strategy to pressure South Africa as far back as 1962, but it came of age in the early 1980s and Columbia became the first hotbed of university action (which was ironic, given its paltry endowment at the time). Divestment extended the Sullivan Principles, developed by a minister who was also a board member of General Motors, which demanded racial fairness in corporate dealings. The pressure point was institutional investors, particularly universities, municipal bond issuers, and public pension funds. At Columbia, the Committee Against Investment in South Africa grew rapidly, and included the great student leaders of my time, Danny Armstrong and Stuart Garcia, as well as a young Hawaiian transfer student named Barry Obama.

There is no ex post facto case for my own activism in the divestment cause (I was no leader), but I did attend several rallies after that night and I did walk around campus a few times with signs, mainly because I liked the people who were involved. Stuart Garcia had been my partner in the lab section of a behavioral psychology course taught by Eugene Galanter, who was a protege of B.F. Skinner, and we had a gas locking each other up in the Skinner boxes and tallying reactions to stimuli the experiments demanded. I met Stuart in 1980 at freshman orientation, and introduced the young Texan and a few other out-of-towners to the wonders of Max's Kansas City, Danceteria, and the Peppermint Lounge in partnership with my native bridge and tunnel tribesmen, Doug Tween and the two Toms, Kissane and FitzSimmons. As I've written before, Stuart was one of the early casualties of AIDS, dying only two years after graduation, in 1986. He was a natural politician, had the common touch. Short, friendly, with a shock of thick straight hair that levitated when he walked. There is no doubt in my mind that he'd be a figure in American politics had he lived, either in his native Texas or somewhere else. He was open, not shy, a friend to all - my opposite, in those years, really. And he was 23 when he died. But in 1983 he was gloriously alive and marching, and some of those he marched with carried signs with pictures of Nelson Mandela on them.

To those of us who frequented New York's musical clubs in that era, Mandela came to us in song as well as image. The Specials were a great British ska band with a sound that moved, they played all the clubs in New York when they were in town, and ska ran second only to over-driven punk rock (and vintage Motown, if truth be told) on the big jukebox downstairs at Max's. As Columbia students marched, the Specials released a protest song with a hook so damned big you couldn't help but sing Nelson Mandela's name all day long. Free-ee-ee-ee Nelson Mandela. At the time, of course, Mandela was still in prison for this efforts to overthrow Apartheid; he'd serve another six years for a total of more than 27 years. His body abused, but his mind is still free. You're so blind that you cannot see. The song was everywhere. And the Specials were cool.

A few years ago, I found myself chatting briefly with Illinois Senator Barack Obama in the receving line at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Dressed uncomfortably in rented white tie and tails - required get-up for the dais at the annual Al Smith Dinner - Obama stood next to Cardinal Egan, who in turn stood next to Senator John McCain and his wife Cindy, in the traditional show of bi-partisanship and Catholic elan that defines the famous occasion during Presidential election years. Obama looked tired and not entirely comfortable, but I waded in anyway. We talked a little bit about Columbia days and sitting on the steps in front of Low Library in warm weather. And then I told him I knew he'd been in the divestment marches, part of that movement. "It was formative," he said, in that professorial tone we've all come to know, with the clipped mid-western "r" he uses. We shook hands and I moved on, somewhat concerned that I'd left the impression that I was a college rabble-rouser and not the campus Strat-o-matic champion.

A year later, in the same Waldorf setting, I found myself standing next to Steve van Zandt, the Bruce Springsteen sideman and Sopranos actor, at another charity dinner. Strangely enough, the subject of Apartheid came up again, and I praised his work in the effort. Van Zandt had led a coalition of musicians in the recording of Sun City in 1985, a year after I left Columbia. The song called on artists no to play the Sun City resort, then a whites only casino enclave for wealthy South Africans. In addition to Springsteen, Van Zandt had rounded up the likes of Lou Reed, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and Joey Ramone to take part. Twenty-three million can't vote because they're black. We're stabbing our brothers and sisters in the back. It was another great song that stuck with you.

Obama was right. It was a formative time, and the figure of Nelson Mandela and twenty-three million countrymen denied basic human rights did tend to stick. The divestment battle and the rallies to push the United States to do the right thing in South Africa made a different. Winning victories, says my friend Al Giordano, an organizer with a Vince Lombardi mindset, is what drives real citizens movements: "Mandela will always be one of history’s great role models in the art of building public opinion to win victory, instead of suffering defeat after defeat."

On that rainy night on Morningside Heights, I did finally find the delivery man on Amsterdam Avenue. But I think I found something more as well, and it was linked to man in a jail cell thousands of miles away. I had no role in that struggle at all, but I saw the art of building public first hand, the power of the story in the cause. And the protest songs had big hooks, besides.

December052013

Of all of New York's public buildings, the one I have spent the most time in by far is connected to bridges and tunnels to the north, from the Bronx all the way to the rural Harlem Valley in the east and Franklin Roosevelt's Dutchess County duchy to the west. The passenger railroad lines that end in Grand Central Terminal - that's terminal, not "station" for all you bumpkins - carry nearly 300,000 riders every weekday, spilling men in gray flannel still, and commuters of every shape and background into one of the world's finest public spaces.

Grand Central opened in 1913 replacing the smaller station on the same spot, built by the New York Central Railroad during the days when train travel in America still involved helping to build the fortunes of transportation barons. E.B. White's "unexpungeable odor of the long past" in New York certainly covers the vast spaces in Grand Central, competing perhaps with the simmering vats of chowder in the Oyster Bar, the fresh bakery counter at Zaro's, or the less savory smells of lost people sleeping on benches or floors in any given decade of my experience there.

Before we walk along the platform, through the sliding green doors to the great, open concourse of North American imagination and commercial energy - tracing in reverse the footsteps of Cary Grant in North By Northwest - let's take a moment to consider the start of the journey less than twenty miles away (about thirty minutes on a rush hour express) because that's where the story begins. I was born across the street from the commuter rail station in Bronxville, arriving in Lawrence Hospital during another February snowstorm in a month of February snowstorms that year, the day after John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. My grandfather bought a new camera for the occasion, launching a productive late life avocation that eventually earned him an international photography prize for his portrait of the Matterhorn.

In truth, I was born into what became a central hub for my life, a quintessential patch of near suburbia that still attracts movie location scouts and investment bankers. I still see the hospital where I was born every time I take the train into Manhattan. I also see the former offices of William H. Watson Real Estate, which stood next to Bob's Cup and Saucer on the ground floor of the Station Park Building on Parkway Road, directly opposite the southbound platform. Just to the south is the block where the filling station once managed by my uncle Augustine J. Ryan stood, just around the corner from the little bowling alley where my brother and I rolled many a game on the earnings from a neighborhood snow shoveling business up the hill in Yonkers.

The Bronxville station house was opened in 1916 and its distinctive Spanish architecture matched the glamor of the Gramatan Hotel, which sat on the village's highest downtown hill, and opened in 1905 as the vision of real estate developer William Van Duzer Lawrence, whose planned suburban community created some of the sprawling Norman and Tudor mansions that aim to emulate the charm of a Europe before the apocalypse of the first half of the 20th century. The most important event in the history of the grand Gramatan took place in 1958, when my parents celebrated their wedding in its ballroom. The hotel came down, sadly, in the 1970s and was replaced by condos now showing their age, but a lower row of storefronts along Sagamore Road survives and includes the barber shop that cares for my thinning pate and the Mexican restaurant that welcomes some of our largest birthday fiestas which giant sombrero and a blast of the Beatles' Birthday. Down Kraft Avenue on the northbound side of the rail line is the movie theater, once a single screen where I remember feeling the terror of Kirk Douglas's performance in Jules Verne's bizarre pirate tale The Light at the End of the World, fronted by several Mr. Magoo shorts, somewhere around 1971. Some years later, I had the opportunity to inquire about that film to an older Kirk Douglas in the lobby of the Beverly Hilton; he nodded pleasantly and signed a book to my father, who attended Bronxville High School and hiked with its Scout troop.

Bronxville was and is a fairly wealthy place, perhaps the archetype of the tony Westchester villages that grew up around railroad stations and sent their mainly male white collar workforce into Grand Central on a daily basis. We were not wealthy, and aren't still, but the orientation of a Yonkers family toward the planned village of the Lawrence clan was partly a cultural nod to its leafy and less urban ways, as well as the product of family commerce and geography. When I was a child of school age - grammar school to young Catholics of that time - my mother drove the same route down Palmer Road, through Bronxville, up Tanglewylde Hill (where we'd almost always point out the pocket manse of Candid Camera announcer Durwood Kerby - now there's a star for you), along to White Plains Road and on to the Immaculate Conception School in Tuckahoe, where my mother taught and we collected catechisms, writing skills, and lifelong friends. The reverse commute back to Yonkers meant stops in Bronxville for important errands: the WPA-built post office with its distinctive mural by John French Sloan (The Arrival of the First Mail in Bronxville, looking more like a scene from a cinematic adaptation of Dickens, which fits Bronxville to a tee, if you know Bronxville), Woolworths, and the A&P, where the big thrill was pulling the level on the grinding machines churning Eight O'Clock coffee beans into aromatic grist for the percolator on my grandmother's stove.

For me, as well as being a hub of family activity - the funeral home has seen its share of related wakes, I said my first Hail Mary on my knees in St. Joseph's Church, and enjoyed my first book signing in Womrath's bookshop - Bronxville has long been the stepping off point for "the city." The train took adolescents to Madison Square Garden for The Who, the Allman Brothers, Springsteen marathons, and the No Nukes shows and to the clubs of the Lower East Side, and then later to college on Morningside Heights. Still later, a decade of daily commutation from the same platform, stomping out the cold on dawning winter mornings and fighting for a seat, while wearing a suit and tie.

And every single time, after each short sprint down the Harlem Line, Grand Central itself was a wonder. Yes, buildings can thrill and this one did and does through the sheer space it creates and the life that teems through that space and the light of its tall windows every day. With Pennsylvania Station demolished in my childhood, the 1970's citizens campaign to preserve Grand Central leveraged its most glamorous partner in the public interest Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (the Kennedys had once commuted from Bronxville, too) to successfully defeat a plan for more slab-sided towers above the concourse. The effort preserved a work of genius, and a keystone to what makes New York.

Built by the Vanderbilts, designed by the firms of Warren and Wetmore, and Reed and Stem in the Beaux Arts style, Grand Central is perhaps the most beautiful railway station in the world. Yet what makes Grand Central such a marvel isn't just its soaring stand-alone beauty, but in how it connected and inspired the midtown Manhattan that grew up around it - from the creation of Park Avenue to the north, to its surrounding necklace of archictural gemstones with great diamond of the Chrysler Building at the center. They're all there because Grand Central is there, because of the path of millions of people through that hall and through those doors decade after decade. When you stand on an Atlantic beach and look out at the ocean, its vastness and timelessness make you feel small and humble, but at the same time, part of something much greater than yourself, much longer than the confines of your life. In New York, only Grand Central Terminal can evoke those feelings - and it has for me as I walked the same paths as millions of others, through the many years.

Where those doors lead, inside and outside the terminal, down the streets of New York, into the subway tunnels, and through those many years - we'll see where it goes.

December042013

There is a spot in Yonkers near a curve on Palmer Road, just up from the intersection of Mile Square Road, high on the hill above the Dunwoodie Golf Course, where on a relatively clear day you can peer from the red Chevrolet station wagon and glimpse the towers of midtown Manhattan about 16 miles to the south.

"Look, there's the city!"

And the city it was to my brother and my sister and me, and our parents too, a postcard of a foreign land of skyscrapers and lights, like the distant backdrop of our movie set lives in the near suburbs. Of course, we lived in a city - two hundred thousand people with its own hardscrabble downtown where my father worked in the composition department of the daily newspaper. The Herald Statesman was founded in the middle of the Civil War as the Yonkers Statesman, later merging with the Yonkers Herald to form the afternoon paper where Dad worked. He took the bus down Palmer Road past the golf course every day, and must have looked south to the Empire State Building a thousand times from that bend in the road.

And unquestionably, he thought to himself: "Hey, there's the city."

I am past the curve in the road at the top of my own life , and I can see "the city" now from a different vantage point. New York was an exotic and little-visited neighbor in childhood, but it became a furtive destination in adolescence, the backdrop for college and my early journalism career, headquarters for a couple of business concerns, one end of the daily commute for two decades, and my intellectual and spiritual home forever. I have never lived any place else, nor have I ever really wanted to.

Looking back through my dirty life and times (to borrow a line from Warren Zevon, the muse of a very different American city across the continent) means looking back through my New York, a phrase I don't employ lightly, tapping these words as I am only a mile or so from the childhood home of E.B. White here in Mount Vernon - another of those small cities ringing the big one, urban places like New Rochelle, Yonkers, Union City, and Hoboken where people stood along river banks or high on a hill and said, "look, there's the city."

"New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact area the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant," wrote White in 1949. "It carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings."

Those queer people and undertakings reverberate for me now but unlike White, I don't feel the need to say "here is New York" but rather, "here was New York" - at least over the past four decades, a time when the city shifted, and leaned, and heaved, and groaned, and suffered, fell and rose and bronzed in the sun of forty summers - and changed. New Yorkers often bemoan the changes. We can be a sentimental lot. The past in New York always seems more vital, more real, more alive - even in black and white - than the present in this town. There's too much building, too much of the municipal eraser at work scrubbing away the past, tearing down and building something shinier. But it's been that way since they filled the public cess pit just north of the old northern walls and built City Hall back in the 1820s. Yet I think that in this New York, with its vast unbridgeable distances between the wealthy and everybody else, and the limiting of actual residency in the middle class to the very edges of Manhattan and the swelling, refurbished outer borough hubs, there is a sense of something lost.

It wasn't that way when I was the skinny bridge and tunnel kid in green sneakers, tight Lee jeans and an old dungaree jacket skulking past the door at Max's Kansas City or CBGB, or gaping at the massive public festival of lewdness that was Times Square three decades ago, or splitting fries in the old railroad diner near the West Side Highway before taking that bridge back to the suburbs at night. That was famously grimy time, now celebrated in custome exhibitions underwritten by billionaires at the Metropolitan Museum of Art - itself a secret palace of the people, where my artist true love and I paid a suggested admission of a buck apiece for the privelege of browing Winslow Homer and Cezanne before a cozy cup of coffee and a shared danish in gorgeous the Greek court cafeteria that once defined the classiest place in New York to eat lunch off a plastic tray. All gone, of course. The Met now has a spiffy new public dining concourse in the basement with myriad ethnic food stations and an endless array of niche bottled beverages; it could be Peoria.

A few years ago, I looked up at the ceiling above the bar at McSorley's Old Ale House down on 7th Street and saw perhaps a century and a half of accumlated filth, stuck stubbornly to the little artifacts and items the bar keeps up there. In some city bureaucrat's office, there must be a waiver. Along with Houdini's handcuffs, there are dusty wishbones up there that may carry the teeth marks of Melville and Whitman. That kind of layered grime, like the bacteria-infused growth rings of New York's massive family tree, is rare in today's city. Does that melancholic nostalgia touch me in middle age? Yes, I find it does. "Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon," wrote Melville. "Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries."

We're still fixed in those reveries, even if New York's docks are generally limited to tourist boats and commuter ferries. While everyone else on this continent looks toward New York at one time or another, we lose ourselves in thoughts of elsewhere - and it's not merely reveries that drives those without seven figures in their investment portfolios away from the city. It's the reality of economics. Thence by Whitehall northward brings you past Bowling Green to lower Broadway, and two years ago that route led to the encampment of a leaderless protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street. There were minstrels in that camp. It was entertainment and street threater and urban camping, an ad hoc committee of this generation's bridge and tunnel kids, white middle class young people in the main, staging small dramas and forced marches, sometimes rather bravely in the face of police truncheons, pepper spray and plexiglass shields, against cops who were unions members acting against their own economic and social interests to please the bosses in the towers that overlooked Zuccotti Park.

There were ghosts there as well, souls from the towers that once overlooked that park and almost every public space for miles. And I felt those ghosts keenly during those times when I walked through the rag taggy Occupy troops and sampled their rhetorical wares. They were the ghosts of office workers, and cops, and firefighters who left New York in the blaze of one blue morning when I too was at work in a New York office building.

These were all stories to be told, and since those early days at my father's side in visits to the Larkin Plaza newspaper offices just up from the old pier in Yonkers, visits I remember best by the smell of melted wax used for paste-up and the crush of my father's big hand, I have felt the urge to tell those stories under my own name, in a place where other people might read them. A few weeks ago, I spoke to a class of Syracuse University writing students under the able tutelage of my old blogging buddy Lance Mannion, and one them asked "why do you blog?"

Because I'm compelled to, almost by obsession. And by blog, I mean write. So this is a start to a circumambulation of my New York, a journey I may need to capture for myself with stops in Yonkers, Flushing, the Lower East Side, Morningside Heights, Riverdale, Broad Street, GrayBar, and in watering holes all around the town. We'll see.

May062013

Without even venturing to the upper reaches of Fifth Avenue, I unreservedly despise the Metropolitan Museum's new Costume Institute exhibition, PUNK: Chaos to Couture, which purports to "examine punk's impact on high fashion from the movement's birth in the
early 1970s through its continuing influence today."

To put it simply, there is nothing in this particular quadrant of the celestial universe more un-punk than a Met show on punk's impact on couture.

This is all you need to know about punk fashion: sometime in the late 70s, I saw Stiv Bators walk past me on the stairs at Max's in some kind of multi-layered leather jacket sarong with a red scarf and thought, "I gotta find something that like."

There is no punk fashion after that. By 1983, punk fashion was for marketers and those who'd missed it. Vivienne Westwood, the MRI for your soul beckons - perhaps some wisp may be seen on the resonance machine. But I doubt it.

For those who were there - and yeah, this is a fogey rant so bear with me kiddies - "punk fashion" was the most ephemeral thing in the world. Sure, the more manufactured of the British punks were studied collectors and McLaren tried his marketing bones (and went belly up) but all else was momentary experimentation. Otherwise it was thrift shop nonsense and passing fancy; fashion of the moment, by the moment, and for the moment.

The recreation of CBGB at the Met is like the faux Oval Office in George W. Bush's new Presidential library - there's an unsanitary stain on your soul if you're taken in by the exhibitor's artifice.

To quote my friend Al Giordano via his angry Facebook feed:

Why do some of my chums seem to crave "institutional endorsement" for something whose first beauty
was its utter contempt for institutions and absolute disregard for
their approval? Day in, day out, we are treated to bombastic NY Times
"stories" on this stupid exhibit, people who should know better link to
them and cheer them. Well, sit down all of ye and stare at this
Bloomingdales ad (hat tip Jim Sullivan)
and contemplate what *always* happens when institutions try to make
something theirs. I hope someone tosses dollar bills off the balcony
during tonight's exhibit opening to reveal the true colors of this
porkfest and lay waste to its elite pretensions.

Please remember dear friends that the Met is one of my favorite New York institutions. I liked it back in those days too. But for different reasons. I guess you can't put your arms around a memory (and Johnny Thunders knew his way around fashion, bub), but today's fashion manques can try and sell some baubles from the days of yore.

April302013

When I was in the last years of grade school and an underclassman in high school - both Catholic, middle class, and predominantly white - there was one word that almost always guaranteed playground or sandlot bloodshed among adolescent males.

The word was "faggot."

If you've seen 42, then you know its most heated scene consists of Philadelphia Phillies manager Ben Chapman standing on the dug-out steps shouting variations of our most hated racial epithet at Jackie Robinson - over and over, in a chanting cat-calling cadence that is designed to evoke a physical response.

Fight or flight, the human instinct particularly sharpened in the nervous systems of young men.

Ben Chapman had nothing on some of the guys I grew up with, although their special milieu wasn't race, it was sexual orientation. "C'mone, faggot!" was the tag line of one particular 70s bully whose name does not escape me. You fought (and probably suffered) or you ran. I, for one, took off at full gallop. Others fought and were patched up by the school nurse.

None of us questioned the underlying challenge. In point of fact, we barely understood it - except for those among us who were, of course, gay. I'm sure they got it. And I'm certain they suffered worse in silence than the cuts and bruises the non-runners tolerated.

What was this challenge? That being called gay - the term was not widely in use at the time; the more polite noun was actually "homo" - was the worst put down, right up there in fight challenge parlance with questioning the sexual proclivities of the maternal? And that it meant weakness, a failure of proper gender, the banishment of the outsider? I didn't stop to think - yes, I was too busy running. But I just wasn't prepared for it either. The culture would barely support the conversation.

I feel some shame at this memory. In my amended biography, it would be nice to find a heroic chapter in which I stood up and shouted "yeah, I'm a homo - what of it, buster?" But my Pro Keds and their fleet tread provided the best option for my adolescent legs. I ran from conflict with the slur, yes - but I mainly ran from fear of physical violence. And when I didn't run, I was silent. Sad to say, we all pretty much were.

In truth, acceptance of this despised "other" was easy - in no small part due to the catechism of liberal 60s and 70s Catholicism. I felt no hatred, no real dislike, and little revulsion - certainly no more revulsion than I felt for the hormone inebriated monster that inhabited my own body. I read a lot and learned, in theory, about the many flavors of man at a fairly young age. But I didn't stand up, and of course, the moment passed. Older high school boys became more polite and less bullying, in general. And college provided the wonders of real diversity and experience. I stopped hearing "faggot" on the playground because I'd left the playground.

And then it was 1998.

In October of that year, a young gay student at the University of Wyoming was tortured and murdered near Laramie, Wyoming. His name was Matthew Shepard and his killers left him hanging from a wire fence to die because he was homosexual.

By all accounts, Shepard was a sweet kid, smart and promising. His father said Matthew was "an optimistic and accepting young man who had a special gift of relating to almost everyone. He was the type of person who was very approachable and always looked to new challenges. Matthew had a great passion for equality and always stood up for the acceptance of people's differences."

More than anything - yes, even more than the tragic AIDS plague of the 80s, I'd have to admit, though I was a "liberal" throughout - Shepard's murder made me realize the real stakes in "gay rights." This was a civil rights crusade. It was about the rights of non-heterosexual Americans to live as freely as everyone else. And it was about the forces of darkness, the spit-flaked speech of the playground, the incitement to violence and shunning and shame.

I began to think that it wasn't the Matthew Shepards of the world who needed the courage to come out of the closet - and be welcomed by the normal world - it was the rest of us who needed the collective courage to tear the damned closet down.

Nothing in American political life of recent vintage has been as stunning and inspiring as the success of equal rights - political, social and cultural - for gay citizens. That advance in less than a generation is one of this country's most hopeful signs for the future. And the refusal of my children's generation to even categorize LGBT people is astounding and welcome.

So in some ways, the brave decision of NBA center Jason Collins to come out in Sports Illustrated this week feels more like an important postscript. I know it's not, of course. Marriage is still before the U.S. Supreme Court. Sodomy laws remain on the books in many states. Religious establishments protect prejudice. Things don't change quickly enough.

Yet the reaction to Collins's courage was swift and validating - especially among his former teammates and professional athletes. That reaction in response to the elegant SI essay really matters, it seems to me. The passage in which Collins talks about wearing 98 in tribute to Matthew Shepard was deeply moving. (And how cool was it that Collins is a classic NBA enforcer, a journeyman Anthony Mason?) More gay athlets will clearly live in public. Their teammates will support them. Those athletes can change the playground rules. Sports culture is a stubborn hold-out on all fronts of sexual and gender equality. But under the hoop, maybe we won't hear the real F-bomb as much any more.

April202013

Hindsight broadcasts in full HD, but I remember thinking yesterday that the total lockdown ordered by authorities for the greater Boston metropolitan area - with the "shelter in place" order stretching from roughly Emerson's house down to the Adams farm, and from Paul Revere's shop out past Bunker Hill and along the Charles to Watertown, where the Committees of Correspondance once met in direct contravention of the British Crown - was just a bit much.

People walking dogs ordered inside. Bars closed. The Red Sox game with the Royals cancelled. Universities shut down. The entire public transportation system at full stop. The loss of perhaps a quarter of billion dollars in trade for a the nation's 9th largest metropolitan area - sometimes known on school trips as the Cradle of Liberty. [Not all the economic news was bad: Karen Raskopf, chief communications officer for Dunkin’ Donuts, told HuffPo that the shops were asked to remain open “to take care
of needs of law enforcement and first responders.”]

All this for one killer on the loose. While praise for the Boston police in the live capture of one of the two suspected bombers after a rampage of death and destruction that killed five in total (including the older of the two suspected brothers and an MIT police officer) and maimed dozens was nearly unanimous last night - celebrated on live TV by vast inebriation on Boston Common, proving that some of that noble city's traditions of liberty hadn't been lost - there was a small murmer that went something like..."hey, WTF?" (We live in a Twitter age, people).

Cautious criticism crept in. Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, lead Democrat on the House
Intelligence Committee and a member of the same party as Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, got into it on Politico: “When you have lives at stake, it’s up to law enforcement. But it’s an accomplishment when someone shuts down
an entire community and people can’t go outside and are told to stay
away. We have to stand up as Americans to this. … We’ve got to continue
to go to baseball games, continue to go to events. We can’t allow these
people to shut us down.”

I suspect that the very word "terror" fit not just this horrific and brutal crime but the emotional reaction itself - just as it's designed to do - and not just greater Boston's but our general American reaction. Terror, with its modern-day insinuation of international plotting and violent religious zealotry, has spawned a decade-long over-reaction in our society. "The homeland is the battlefield,” proclaimed Senator Lindsey Graham last night, urging the Obama Administration to treat the captured and seriously wounded 19-year-old suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant, even though he's a naturalized U.S. citizen who came to this country when he was eight.

When you can scare a United States Senator so easily that you force him to reveal his own terror in all its chilling depth - well, the tactics of brutality and random murder might well appear to be profitable indeed to those lacking humanity.

Boston's declaration of near martial law might seem protective and just playing it safe - what Michael Cohen of the Century Foundation called "cover your ass business by public
officials" - but doesn't it also prescribe a precedent? I was cheered at the Obama Adminsitration's decision to process the junior Tsarnaev in criminal court and not whisk him off to military detention. But it's also troubling that authorities invoked the "public safety exception," which allows investigators to question a suspect without reading his Miranda warnings against self incrimination and the right to counsel. I often disagree with Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian on some of the nuances of civil liberties, but he was exactly right in his latest column when he noted that this decision is one in a long line of other cases that have gradually eroded the basic rights of criminal suspects to the extent that it makes the invokation of such an extraordinary civil liberties exemption so mundane a choice.

I'm a fan of the cops, the firefighters, the EMTs, the first responders, the members of public service unions who risk their necks for the rest of us. And though I believe that since 9/11 we've over-militarized civilian police forces to a regrettable extent, I still think that most peace officers work to keep the peace. They faced a horrible, rapidly unfolding challenge in Cambridge and Watertown, no question. And they protected the populace. Certainly no one can exempt the omnipresent media for stoking the kind of paranoia our society generally shares during one of these events. Via Digby, I found Rick Perlstein's post in The Nation to be on point about terror and the cost of that mass paranoia:

As ghastly, evil, overwhelming, tragic, as the events this week in
Boston, Texas, the Capitol mail rooms, have been, it's easy to forget,
in our oh-so-American narcissism, enveloped in the wall-to-wall coverage
that makes our present catastrophe feel like the most important events
in the universe, how safe and secure Americans truly are by any rational
standard. Terror shatters us here precisely because ours is not a
terrifying place compared to so much of the rest of the world.

And also not really an objectively terrifying time, compared other
periods in the American past: for instance, Christmastime, 1975*, when an
explosion equivalent to twenty-five sticks of dynamite exploded in a
baggage claim area, leaving severed heads and other body parts scattered
among some two dozen corpses; no one ever claimed responsibility; no
one ever was caught; but pretty much, the event was forgotten, life went
on, and no one anywhere said "everything changed."

These days, events like the Marathon bombing are no longer just about the victims, the perpetrators and the cops. We come to believe they're about us. And we almost seem to revel in lockdown mode, even in the Cradle of Liberty.

March272013

March252013

We watched Zero Dark Thirty the other evening, and it struck me that as a big screen country we've reached the cinematic region located roughly halfway between The Green Berets and Platoon in terms of how America copes on film with disastrous, ethics-destroying wars of adventure.

Of course, Zero Dark Thirty isn't about Iraq. It's barely about Afghanistan. But it's most certainly about an era in U.S. military and geopolitical history, an era of crazed intervention and reactionary excuses from both major political parties, an era whose closing credits we're just beginning to glimpse. Perhaps the flick is best understood as The Deer Hunter of the post 9/11 war era - gritty and judgemental of extended American arms in the showing, not the telling, defined at least in part by the gimmick of Russian roulette just as Zero Dark Thirty has concentrated discussion around CIA dark sites and torture.

Frankly, I found Zero Dark Thirty brilliant and honest - not jingoistic at all. From the ghostly voices in lower Manhattan, recorded and doomed to die on that horrible day to the zipping of bin Laden into a U.S. Navy body bag, the film never really cheers, and Kathryn Bigelow doesn't so much create a gleaming American hero from the obsessive Jessica Chastain character as she molds a lasting anti-hero.

I'm embarassed for hit-and-run progressives who believe the film somehow "justifies" water boarding and "enhanced interrogation." It does not. It presents them as facts. As Lance Mannion correctly argued, those lefty critics were all "too distracted listening for speeches that were never delivered." The movie is also long and uncomfortable, like this long dark epoch itself. And the torture is as troubling as the bin Laden killing is matter of fact and mundane.

Indeed, Zero Dark Thirty is an antidote to the entertaining but anodyne Argo, which won Best Picture and is something of a paean to the days when we could all root for the hard-working men and women of the underdog CIA, represented by the handsome, bearded humanist Ben Affleck. In other words, the days of the late 70s - the Deer Hunter era itself, when the U.S. was the weakened world power limping home from Vietnam, and the echoes of the Church hearings still rang in our collective ears like the last chord of a Ramones set.

Rumsfeld and Cheney were great at projecting confidence,
competence and management skills. And we were all still traumatized by
9/11 and grappling with how to respond to it. But we know now they were
as terrified as we were, and their fear drove them to abandon restraint
or skepticism or competent military and intelligence advice.

This feels like an academic debate. But it isn’t. I have blood on
my hands. However many times I try to wash them, the blood will not
come off.

How is he (and others) trying to wash off that blood? By writing blog
posts? How courageous of them. How meaningful for that little dead boy
in the photo he included in his post.

BG is right, of course. The tenth anniversary of the war brought out the worst in those who'd supported it, and now regret their public words. Sullivan's was the just the most egregious example: as if his personal wrangling matters at all. Sully's post-Iraq angst has all the relative value of the post-sleep crud you flick from your eyes in the morning shower. As Blue Girl stingingly wrote:

You are embarrassing yourself. I am embarrassed for you. Please stop.
Stick to writing about product placement in digital media. As far as I
know, no one's kids are going to die hawking Coca Cola.

As James Wolcott coldly noted this week, those whooping "war whore" voices of 2003 have quieted, even if some emerged from intellectual hidey holes to squeak, "sorry!"

How the chickenhawks loved to castigate their
opponents as chicken-hearted. I'll never forget the sick feeling I had
watching the live coverage of the first US "shock and awe" bombing runs
on Baghdad, with so much of the media in vainglorious hoopla mode, as if
it were Super Bowl halftime entertainment.

It was quite the week for liberals who went along with the obvious lies and frabrications and bullying on Iraq in 2003 to pen boring and overly familiar apologia for - you know - assisting in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people and ruining the national reputation internationally for a generation. Charles Pierce was particularly tough on Ezra Klein (who, it must be noted, was in college at the time), but his critique can stand in for the whole sordid genre:

The members of the liberal political elite in this country were
piss-down-their-legs scared of two things in 2002. First, that the next
attack would land on their heads, since most of them live and work in or
near what were presumed to be the primary target zones, both of which
actually had been already. And second, that they would get called
fifth-columnists (or worse) by the triumphalism of the incipient
American imperial adventure in southwest Asia. Nobody wants to be George
McGovern, after all.

This is how it was. Just as Zero Dark Thirty was how it was (as far as feature films can capture truth, that is). We should simply shitcan the apologia, and learn from 2003. Which is to say: eyes open, speak up.

March242013

As is our habit in these (long quiet) precincts, we usually turn to the fabulous M.A. Peel for all things Catholic, Irish, and Mad Men (usually in that order). So we can't let a season turn - though it really hasn't - without a nod to Ms. Peel's take on the new fellow in white paying his own hotel bill like any other Roman holidaymaker, fitting for Palm Sunday:

Much is being made of Pope Francis being the first pontiff of the
Americas, the first non-European pope. I think that pales in comparison
to being the first Jesuit.

The Guardian had an interesting voting interactive before the
election. For each of the 115 cardinals they had some background, and
listed the one thing each had stated as a priority. For the Argentine
Cardinal Bergoglio, that was "reforming the Curia."

A Jesuit reforming a power structure is the ecclestiastical equivalent
of bringing coals to Newcastle. The Jesuits wrote the book on intrigue
and power.

They did indeed. At least till Don Draper, anway. And that little spring fiesta kicks off in two short weeks. As with the Vatican, we're always ready to cheer a little humility. Wonder what Ms. Peel will make of the new 1967ish look?

March232013

A number of years ago, my Parliamentary namesake the well-known Labour MP Tom Watson from West Bromwich East was kindly giving me a tour behind the scenes of Whitehall, where he was then running the Cabinet Office at the very center of the British Government. As I recall, Tom's office overlooked Horse Guards Parade on one side and the back garden of 10 Downing Street, then tenanted by Gordon Brown, on the other. Catching my look of historical hankering as I gazed out his windows, he took me on a whirlwind look through the passageways until we ended up in Number 10 itself (it's really all one big, rambling connected complex - but perhaps that's a state secret I shouldn't divulge).

In any event, there we were looking around the grand staircase with its portraits, the white drawing room where Presidents are photographed with Prime Ministers, and the famed cabinet room. And just before we left the building - through the black No. 10 door itself, as it turned out - Tom pointed out a rather deflated old brown leather wing chair in the corner of the vestibule. That he said, with some historic flourish, is Winston Churchill's reading chair.

I was recalling this moment of history-related generosity on Mr. Watson's part - it was very cool - as I sailed through The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, the posthumous collaboration between the eminent Connecticut historian William Manchester and Paul Reid. Manchester, the most prominent Western hemisphere Churchillian, was the author of two volumes of a planned three volume biography of Churchill, the last of which was published in 1988 left Churchill on the edge of the premiereship - and the Second World War - in 1940. Manchester's health failed him, though he compiled acres of notes and outlines for the final volume before he died in 2003.

Like many armchair historians, Manchester's writing was formative for me. Goodbye Darkness, his account of the war in the Pacific, in part a first-person narrative, is among the great war books ever written. Manchester had the knack for weaving large-scale events into ground-level stories that imparted both the global machinations of empires and lives of actual people. So when my friend Eric Goldberg, over some Italian wine at I Trulli, strongly recommended the Manchester-Reid book - and Eric has never steered me wrong on history - a download was imminent.

I'd read the somewhat mixed reviews last fall when the book was released, but was intrigued by how Reid, who met Manchester as a reporter for the Palm Beach Post, deciphered both the old man's notes and his intentions like a one-man Bletchley Park team and produced a long, final chapter. And I'm not disappointed. Indeed, I think Reid's journalistic skills serve him very well on the vast, global canvas that was the last quarter century of Churchill's life. And I'm struck with the real generosity and ambition of the book. Certainly, the world didn't demand another Churchill biography; the Roy Jenkins book could certainly have served as the last big 20th century summation of that giant's life. Yet Reid is sure to explain - and then to demonstrate in capturing the sweep of events that defined Manchester's first two works - that this is a Manchester book and worthy of that reputation. The bones of garden are Manchester; the walls and pathways are laid out and familiar and the soil well-tilled with a lifetime's research. The plants are mainly Reid's - but they're arranged in the way that Gertrude Jekyll gardens still are decades after the great gardener's death. The grand design is recognizable.

As to Churchill, such is the cartoonish reputation still that it's always refreshing to read an open-eyed biography - one that countenances weakness, failure, and (perhaps) the immorality and folly of empire itself. Nonetheless, courage really was contagious in Britain in 1941 - and Churchill's keen sense of the Cold War's rise remains an example of actual strategic thinking by a major political leader. I'm not saying Churchill's world view should be welcomed early in this new century as a tonic for our global problems, nor that Churchill's famously loopy tactical ideas are either. But that clarity? By all means.

March222013

I run my business largely on Google's platform: email, files, calendar, my telephone number and easy syncing across multiple devices. I'm also a power user of Google's Android mobile operating system - it's my choice for both phone and tablet. Of course, Google is my default search engine and mapping program. And like many journalists, academics, and information obsessed geeks, I organized the RSS feeds from blogs and news sites that I followed with Google Reader.

Last week in my Forbescolumn, I joined the general din of outrage among hard-core Reader users when Google announced it was killing the service.

Does Google
understand the concept of corporate social responsibility? That seems
to be the basic question around the company’s strange decision to shut
down a tiny service that serves as a major audience conduit for many
thousands of bloggers, citizen journalists, and self publishers.

Google’s announcement today that it is destroying Google
Reader, the most popular RSS syndication tool was a massive blow to the
blogging community – and to most of those speaking out tonight via
social media, an entirely unnecessary attack on an important corner of
the public Internet by a company with more than $50 billion in revenue
and a newly-won reputation as a tech giant on the move.

Don't forget, Google launched Reader to gain an important niche in the news world - and because of its dominance in search and email, Reader quickly became the largest RSS outlet in the world. But Google seems obsessed with its failed social media platform G+ and is apparently interested in competing with Amazon and Apple on paid magazine and news subscriptions. So Reader became a cost center of limited value....or so the Google chieftains believed.

In fact, the decision to shutter Reader has been a disaster for Google because the company alienated that key user base so completely (and cluelessly, if you ask me). For the couple million it probably saved in not maintaining Reader, it lost many untold millions in social capital and negative publicity, threatening the reception of its upcoming Glass product - and leading most of the tech press to mock this week's release of its new note-taking product, Google Keep.

The headlines told the story - nobody trusts Google to keep a service, even if its successful in winning adoption.

Sorry Google, but you might not realize that you are acting like the
company you wanted to replace: Microsoft. The Barons of Redmond used to
float products into the market — smart displays and weird stuff — that
companies like Samsung and LG would put out in the market, only to yank
them later. In the end, I stopped believing in Microsoft and shifted my
dollars and attention to other brands.

And so on. It really is a matter of trust, and that's something that co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin don't seem to understand. Sure, they're great at innovation for a large company. But where's the sense of common cause, the recognition that social capital actually matters over the long term.

March192013

This is a valley of ashes -- a fantastic farm where ashes grow like
wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the
forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a
transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through
the powdery air.

None of those ash-gray men is named Duda or Nieuwenhuis or Cowgill or Baxter in Scott Fitzgerald's version, but those names and others will patrol what Art Rust Jr. used to call the "outer gardens" when the Mets outfield was several hundred feet to the west in old Shea Stadium.

At Citi Field, the General Manager's office overlooks the broad outfield through the girders of "Shea Bridge," the pedestrian walkway that links the leftfield stands with the big concessions concourse out past centerfield. Looking down from those shiny windows like a modern-day Doctor T. J. Eckleburg is Richard "Sandy" Alderson, a veteran attorney and West Coast baseball executive now in his third year as Commissioner Selig's mandated dismantler of the New York Mets as a high budget, big market sports operation.

...his
eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood
on over the solemn dumping ground.

The dumping ground that the dour Alderson broods over is the Mets outfield, once a place of almost literary exploits - the ground where Tommie Agee roamed and Cleon Jones excelled, where Rusty Staub played one-armed and Darryl Strawberry went yard. It's territory that belongs to Mookie and Lenny, McReynolds and Beltran, Maz and Swoboda. Heck, Ellis Valentine, Bruce Boisclair and Steve Henderson would look pretty good right now.

But Alderson joked his way through the winter months, minimizing both his respect for the Mets fan base and his own ability to secure a Major League outfielder. Oh sure, he signed Marlon Byrd, the 35-year-old journeyman with a .278 career average and a 50-game suspension for PED abuse last season. That'll bring a vast over-capacity to what has increasingly been an emptier ballpark in this, the Alderson Era.

Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an
invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and
immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an
impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your
sight.

Take a look around. Duda is big lug who can hit a ball a long way way when the lumber catches it. But he's 27, he can't field (first base is his "natural" position) and the coaching staff doesn't love his work ethic. Baxter is a local product with hustle and fire who saved Johan Santana's ill-fated (for him, and us) no-hitter - and who remains a great fifth outfielder to have on a gritty, winning team. Cowgill is an over-achiever imported from Oakland, a quadruple A Lenny Dykstra wannabe who will clearly grace the "More Cowgill!" 7Line T-shirt by Opening Day. And Nieuwenhuis? Well, we can't help but nod along with the Wall Street Journal's Tim Marchman, who argues that "Captain Kirk" (as some of the faithful call him) personifies the Alderson-led New York Mets. On the one hand, "there is a long list of things not to like about Nieuwenhuis's game." And on the other, "He doesn't do anything that well, but he also isn't terrible at a variety of things. Not being terrible counts for a lot."

Oh boy, get me the season ticket office on the line - and hurry! This Mets outfield isn't bad. It's historically bad. Darkly bad. Tragically bad. Just not - as Sandy Alderson seems to believe - humorously bad. Casey Stengel's not around any more. Howard Megdal wrote in the offseason: "This is not to say the 2013 Mets will be worse than
the 1993 or 1962 Mets. But their outfield probably will be."

The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their irises
are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair
of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose.
Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his
practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into
eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away.

In truth, there's a kind of eternal blindness required by sports fandom. To root, we must forgive. And certainly, we should forget. The Wilpon family's Madoff troubles obscure a long-term problem with how management ran a big market franchise. The Mets haven't won since 1986, when Nelson Doubleday owned half the team. They came close with an over-achieving team in 2000 and not as close with an under-achieving squad in 2006. And then they faded like the oculist's sign out on Roosevelt Avenue, and despite a spiffy new stadium, many fans forgot them and moved away.

Sandy Alderson let Jose Reyes - the greatest shortstop in Mets history and half of the team's famed Core Two (with David Wright) - walk with no formal offer and a nasty little barb about a "box of chocolates." His disdain was obvious. He traded Carlos Beltran for a high-end soup bone named Wheeler, who may make it to Queens later this year. And then he moved the team's lone bright spot last season, Cy Young winning knuckleball philosopher R.A. Dickey, to the Blue Jays for an oft-injured 24-year-old catching prospect who can hit named d'Arnaud. There seems to be a lack of fellowship with the fans on the part of the Mets GM, a bit of cold distance.

Yet even as polite an eminence as prolific Mets blogger Greg Prince came oh-so-close to asking of Alderson, "where's the frigging outfield at?!" during a recent conference call with bloggers. So pronounced is the Mets outfield wont that even Alderson - who staged faux "interest" in the likes of B.J. Upton and Michael Bourn during the winter - didn't try to layer any lipstick on that snout. In every interview, he's basically stipulated that the Mets outfield will stink. No apologies. No real plan for improvement. Buy your tickets and shut up.

The Aldersonian motto seems to be simple. Zero. Fucks. Given. The perfect 7Line T-shirt for this upcoming season, by the way.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and,
when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on
waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an
hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was
because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.

The dismal scene may include an Opening Day non-sellout, as Shannon Shark has been busy chronicling on his happily revived and re-clawed Mets Police blog. Shark's at his best when the Mets are at their worst (happy solicitude and an endless parade of jersey porn don't really suit his considerable talents), and he's been laying into the team with the highest low-end ticket prices for an Opening Day tilt in Major League Baseball. His quickie investigation last week (ice cream cone included) shows that lo and behold, you could easily purchase blocks of Mets tickets to opening day a dozen at a time - in every section of the ballpark for the April 1 game with the visiting Padres. Bring the kiddies, bring the wife, bring the whole church choir. [And do yourself a favor and pick up Shannon's excellent Mets memoir, Send The Beer Guy.]

But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift
endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.
J. Eckleburg.

The gray land and bleak dust of Citi Field are broken by few beams. Matt Harvey is one of the best young pitchers in the big leagues, tough and throws hard and inside. Ike Davis can hit when healthy. David Wright is David Wright, part third-baseman, part Mets marketing plan. Jordany Valdespin is talented and (perhaps) maturing. He may even play the outfield. The rest is backup infielders, old prospects, third and fourth starters, comebacking relief specialists, veteran bench players.

This will be a long season. Opening Day is less than two weeks away. There is no outfield. Alderson's front office lies quiescent and faded like the oculist's sign. And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into fourth place.

February042013

Just seven years after the very halls of the Superdome were a national symbol of abandonment, the failure of government, and the disproportionality of society's response when it is so clearly divided by race and money, the National Football League turned its back on the people of New Orleans with a mammoth expression of glitz and electronics - a display every bit as pompous and crass as Air Force One tilting its wings so that George W. Bush could catch of a fleeting glance of flooded glory.

I don't blame Beyonce, really. She did the job she was contracted for, donned the latex and leather corset, and slunk professionally around a stage drunken with LED lighting and dozens of dancers who mimmicked her moves. Yeah call me a geezer, kiddies, but I thought the idea was that what happened in Las Vegas stayed in Las Vegas. Or is that just a slogan?

The NFL itself didn't even lip sync a concern for New Orleans, or the recognition that a national tragedy unfolded in the Dome, in the streets outside, and in the parishes to the south and east, where hundreds died waiting for help that never came. Last night's gaudy casino fest could have been in any dome, from Tampa to Minneapolis, Seattle to Indianapolis. It spoke not at all of the incredible city of culture that is New Orleans, one of the rare large-scale urban places in the United States that has heroically resisted the pull of social and cultural homogeneity.

What a disgrace. Where was the music? Where was the glorious sound of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and its deeply emotional tradition of New Orleans jazz, a form that to this day thrills the tendons, muscles and bones that lead human beings to move and dance and sway. Where were the modern jazz artists who call New Orleans home? Where were the blues artists who find NOLA to be one of the few places in the U.S. with enough venues to play two shows a day and sleep till noon? And where were the marching bands? Man, the halftime of any Ole Miss-Tulane game has better, more authentic music.

There was blackout in the third quarter last night. Perhaps it represented the still fragile state of New Orleans' recovery, and the city's delicate infrastructure. Or maybe the stadium simply blew a fuse with the technological schock-o-thon at halftime. The game itself was pretty good. But the blackout had another meaning to me. It may have featured Destiny's Child - but it most surely lacked destiny's children.

Shame on the NFL (and their sponsoring Pepsi overlords) for ignoring one of the great seats of American culture. Heckuva job, Beyonce.

February032013

This video gem is just B-roll from the New York subway in 1986 - 42nd Street, the shuttle, and Times Square. Trains, graffiti, grime, old signs from the 50s, and suits with shoulder pads. That was Ed Koch's New York.

The man was picaresque character, a giant whose corners would be knocked off by today's anodyne culture before he ever attained high office. Koch was a piece of work, alternately a racially insensitive bully who swung hard right during Reagan and sold the city to developers - and a surprisingly kind man in person who treated regular people like taxi drivers, waiters, cops and little old ladies with genuine respect.

In the mid-80s, he planned a big affordable housing initiative with his pals in the real estate industry. One particular development was to go up in the southern end Kingsbridge, just down the hill from Riverdale, about a thousand units. There was vocal protest. I was deputy editor and political reporter for The Riverdale Press at the time, and Buddy Stein and I traveled to City Hall one afternoon for a meeting with Koch and his team.

The man was civility itself: we lunched with the Mayor and his deputies in his private dining room as he tried to sell the plan. At one point he turned and repeated a quip he was to use dozens of times in his (unsuccessful in the end) quest to build the housing complex.

"Tom, you know how it is in Riverdale, don't you? It's last one in, shut the door!"

The line, delivered loudly with that familiar rising cadence, carried all of its inherent 'Kochness' like the blast of tunnel wind from the IRT as it hit Times Square in the 80s, covered with the tags of teenagers from the outer boroughs. That was a New York we won't see again. Grimy, full of fear, without the polish and the brass plaques and the property values. There was no better place on earth for a young reporter to go out, collect stories, and write. I miss it.